Robbie Forester and the Outlaws of Sherwood Street

by Peter Abrahams

  “Wow,” I said. Totally inadequate, but I couldn’t think of anything better. I glanced over at Ashanti. There were tears in her eyes. We still held hands, but our arms weren’t spread as though we were gliding, because we weren’t gliding on a breeze or making any other kind of effort. We were just up there, period. I was excited, thrilled, full of joy, but strangely calm at the same time, my heart beating only a little faster than normal, and even that might have been a leftover from running in that alley and being so scared. Maybe that was the most amazing part of how I felt now: I wasn’t scared the least bit. The truth was I felt more confident than all the times I’d felt confident in my whole life rolled into one and multiplied by zillions.

  “Let’s go higher,” I said.

  “How?” said Ashanti.

  “I don’t know,” I said, withdrawing my hand from hers in order to make one of those palms-up I-don’t-know gestures. Big mistake. The moment I let go, the soaring stopped, like someone had hit the brakes, and then came the sensation of the floor being whisked out from under me—completely crazy, since there was no floor—and I started to fall.

  “No!” I screamed.

  And had barely got the word out before Ashanti reached down and grabbed me by the collar of my jacket. A slight lurch, like being in a souped-up dragster surging forward, although I’d never been in a souped-up dragster and had no wish to, and then I was back to soaring. Ashanti took my hand with one of hers, let go of my collar with the other.

  “You all right?” she said, glancing over at me.

  “Yeah.”

  “Just remember—ray-gun beam operator, that’s you. Wingless flyer, that’s me.”

  “It’s more like soaring,” I said.

  “You’re correcting me? In this situation?”

  “Sort of.”

  Ashanti laughed. “You never quit, do you?”

  Hey! Was that true about me?

  We soared, but low, over Brooklyn. Our power was a powerful power, no doubt about that, and yet flaky at the same time. For example, it was already pretty clear that we weren’t going to be able to leap tall buildings at a single bound; the best we could manage was cruising around their lower floors. And cruising slowly, by the way.

  “Can you make it go faster?” I said.

  “How exactly?”

  “I don’t know.” This time I skipped the hand-gesture part.

  “Maybe I’ll try thinking it,” Ashanti said.

  “Thinking ‘go faster’?”

  “Yeah.” She closed her eyes tight. We didn’t go any faster.

  That raised an issue in my mind. “Suppose,” I said, “that eventually we want to go down.”

  “Like, to earth?”

  “Just askin’.”

  Ashanti tried the eyes-closed method again. We didn’t descend, stayed at the same altitude, three or four stories up.

  “How about changing direction?” I said.

  “Nope,” said Ashanti, after a few moments. We continued on our plodding course for a while and then started making a gentle right-hand turn around a building that had one of those seedy bars with blackened windows on the first floor and an old man at a computer in the higher-up window we happened to be passing. He looked up from the screen. An amazed expression crossed his face; he rubbed his eyes and looked again just as we passed out of sight. I glanced back, caught a glimpse of him shaking his head—as though to rattle the parts into place—and getting back to work.

  “Did you make that turn happen?” I said.

  “It must have just happened,” Ashanti said. “I was thinking left.”

  Meanwhile we were drifting by one of those rooftop water towers. Stairs led from the roof to the tower, and on the top step was perched an owl, huge and snowy white. I’d never seen an owl before in real life, but there was no doubt about it. The owl watched us. Weren’t owls supposed to have yellow eyes? This owl’s eyes were a very pale and faded shade of blue, kind of… kind of like the eyes of the homeless woman, except for the bloodshot part. It spread its enormous wings—I’d had no idea that owls were so big—and slowly flapped away.

  “I thought for a second it was going to say something,” I said.

  “This is crazy enough already,” Ashanti said. “Better start thinking of some way to get us down. I’ve got dance at seven thirty, and I can’t miss it.”

  “I didn’t know you took dance.”

  “Let’s discuss it later,” Ashanti said. “Think.”

  “What if you breathe out, completely empty your lungs?”

  “What good will that do?”

  “You know,” I said. “Like balloons.”

  Ashanti pursed her lips and breathed out. Nothing happened; we kept drifting along at the same altitude, passing a sign with one of those blinking arrows pointing down to the store entrance below.

  “Balloons, huh?” said Ashanti.

  She really could be very aggravating, but was this a good moment for sending back a little aggro of my own? Probably not. I kept my mouth shut.

  “Why does this… thing have to be so wacky?” Ashanti said, and as soon as she said it we started to drop like a stone.

  We both screamed in total fright. Down, down, down we plummeted—the canal seemed to be below us now, and it was rising at warp speed, but the moment before splashdown, we suddenly leveled out and drifted over the water at a leisurely pace.

  “I think I’m going to puke,” Ashanti said.

  I looked down at the target area, slimy yellow-green water kind of reminiscent of puke itself. “Try burping,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “Sometimes it heads puking off at the pass.”

  Ashanti tried burping. “Hey! It worked.” She turned to me. “Thanks.”

  “Any time.”

  We skimmed over the canal, staying dry by inches, and, barely moving now, came to a stop on the street running parallel to the water. Not on the street, exactly: we hovered about six inches above the pavement.

  And stayed there. The street—same street we’d been on before, I noticed, with the Red Goat on the corner—was deserted, a good thing, since we seemed to be stuck in midair. We stood straight up, kind of flailing at the ground with our feet, to no effect. Ashanti even tried grabbing me by the shoulders and pushing down, but all that did was make her rise.

  “What’s the opposite of jumping?” I said.

  “Huh?” said Ashanti.

  “If we could figure out the opposite of jumping, we could get down.”

  “We can’t figure out the opposite of jumping,” Ashanti said, “for the simple reason there’s no such—”

  And then like a balky old elevator, we were in motion again, settling gently down on planet Earth. The street felt strangely hard against my feet, and my body felt strangely heavy. We stood there. The city seemed silent, which was impossible. After a while, normal sounds started up.

  “Did that really happen?” Ashanti said.

  Could it all have been some sort of hallucination for two? I reached into my pocket, pulled out the wad of drug-dealer cash.

  “It really happened,” I said.

  Down at the end of the block, a battered old van pulled up in front of the Red Goat. Duke, the guy with the shiny bald head and full beard, still dressed like it was summer, got out and went into the bar. A few moments later he returned with Big Nanny on his shoulder. He slid open the side door of the van and lifted Big Nanny inside, then reentered the Red Goat.

  One thing about Ashanti and me, there were these moments when we thought as one. Like now: without a word, we were on the move, running down the street, full speed. We skidded to a stop beside the open van. There was Big Nanny, facing out, her mouth slightly open. From up close, she looked kind of mean. I shoved the cash into Big Nanny’s mouth, and we took off.

  Ashanti and I found a subway station a few blocks away. We hurried down the steps, swiped our cards, and in a minute or two were seated side by side in a half-full car, two schoolgirls backpacking tons of hom
ework after a long day. No one gave us a second look. They didn’t have a clue.

  We got off the train at the stop three blocks from our street and walked home, fast at first, and then, when Ashanti realized that dance was no longer even a remote possibility, slower. We stopped outside her place.

  “What are we going to do about telling people?” I said.

  “Like who?” said Ashanti.

  “Parents, for example.”

  She shook her head. “Who’s gonna believe us? ‘Hey, everybody, Robbie and I were soaring around town last night, but forget any demonstration, because we can’t make it happen. You just have to believe us.’”

  I thought it over. “Got ya,” I said.

  I let myself into the apartment, slipped off my backpack. “Hi,” I called. “Anybody home?” I kind of knew someone was home; you can sense that. But no one answered. I went into the kitchen.

  And there were Mom and Dad, seated at the table, both busy with their laptops. They looked up, their heads moving as one when I came in. I got that uh-oh feeling.

  “Sorry if I’m a little late,” I said.

  “If?” said my mom. She looked tired, with purplish patches under her eyes.

  “I said I was sorry.”

  My mom turned to my dad. I started to feel I’d walked into a play that they’d rehearsed for and I hadn’t. Did the next stage direction say I should open the fridge and start rooting around? Probably not, but I was hungry—famished, in fact, absolutely starving. I wondered whether this power of ours—mine and Ashanti’s although Tut-Tut certainly shared it, too, in some way, and also maybe Silas as well—demanded extra calories. It was a question I would have liked to ask my parents; impossible of course, as Ashanti had pointed out.

  “Robbie?” my dad said. “Can you leave that for later? We want to talk to you.”

  “All right,” I said, maybe not clearly, since I was talking around a mini burrito from Paquita’s—our go-to Mexican takeout place—left over from who knows when. I sat down at the table.

  “So,” my dad said, “it, uh, seems to have taken you a while to get home from school today.”

  “I left a message.”

  “Right,” my dad said. “Good, as far as it goes.”

  “What Chas is trying to say,” said my mom, “is that the message was vague.”

  “On my way home with Ashanti is vague?” I said. Uh-oh. Maybe that sounded a little too confrontational. Was confrontational the way to go right now? Probably not.

  “I’m not sure I understand your tone,” Mom said.

  I waited for her to go on. She didn’t seem to be going on. Did that mean she was waiting for me? My mom, although not a brilliant writer like my dad, was very smart, a fact that sometimes slipped my mind.

  “Tone?” I said, and right away knew that was the wrong word, kind of ironic, tone being the issue and the word tone digging me in deeper.

  “Is something funny?” Mom said.

  “No.” But I knew my face had betrayed me.

  “Let us in on the joke,” said my dad.

  “No joke,” I said, although an insane pressure to laugh and laugh was building inside me and I had no idea why. “Sorry,” I said again.

  I wasn’t one of those kids who got in trouble a lot with their parents; in fact, hardly ever, which added to my confusion. And confusion was at the center of everything, because any account of my after-school activities would lead to what Ashanti and I had agreed were secrets. And for good reason, I could see now: What were we doing? Oh, not much, just flying around town, that kind of thing. Now it would sound insolent and disrespectful on top of being flat-out unbelievable.

  My mom put her hands in a little steeple, tapped her fingertips together. I’d seen her do that before, pausing over a big stack of papers she was reviewing, and knew it meant she was thinking hard. But now I had the impression that a specific kind of thinking was involved, planning maybe, as though she was tapping into place some structure, like a lobster trap, for example.

  “Are you saying we don’t have a right to be concerned with your safety?” she said.

  “No,” I said, and meanwhile that urge to laugh kept growing stronger.

  “Good,” said Mom. “Because you’re twelve years

  old.”

  “Albeit a savvy city girl,” said Dad.

  Mom gave him a look, and before she’d finished giving it to him, his cell phone rang. He squinted at the screen. “Got to take this,” he said, and left the room. She watched him all the way, her face unreadable, and then turned back to me. Hey! Was I causing some sort of problem between them?

  “Savvy for twelve doesn’t mean savvy period, correct?” Mom said.

  “Correct.”

  “So where were you?”

  “With Ashanti, just hanging out.”

  “Hanging out where?”

  “Around the school. In the neighborhood.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Nothing special. Hanging out.”

  Mom had been gazing at me over that little steeple. Now she lowered her hands, rested them on the table. “If something was wrong, you’d tell me?” she said.

  Maybe on paper that would have looked like a question, but it sounded more like an order. For some reason, that was enough to set off the laughter. It came bursting out, completely unstoppable. But big surprise: not in the form of laughter. In fact, it came in the form of sobbing. That shocked me and shocked Mom, too: I could see it on her face.

  “Robbie?” She rose, hurried around the table. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing, Mom. Nothing’s wrong.”

  She took me in her arms. Sobbing turned to normal crying, and then quickly petered out, my mom hugging me. It had been some time between parental hugs; was the lengthening of those nonhugging interludes part of growing up?

  I pulled away, wiping my face on the back of my sleeve. My mom didn’t quite let go, still had her hands on my shoulders.

  “Obviously something is wrong,” she said. “What happened tonight?”

  “Nothing.”

  “At school?” she said. “Did something bad happen at school?”

  “No.”

  “Oh, God. Don’t tell me you had another one of those headaches?”

  “No, Mom. I feel fine.” And I did, physically. Emotionally, I felt horribly weak and stupid on account of my little sobbing jag. Would Ashanti ever have melted down like that? No way.

  “Did you get into conflict on the way home? Did someone… bother you? Harass you? Interfere in

  any—”

  “No, no, no.” I stepped further back, out of her grasp.

  “Then what were you crying about?”

  “I don’t know, Mom.”

  She folded her arms. “You were with Ashanti?”

  “Yes.”

  “The whole time?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m calling her parents.”

  “No!”

  “No? Why not?”

  “Because you’ll embarrass me.”

  “Tough,” Mom said, opening a drawer and taking out the Thatcher book. The next moment, she was punching numbers on the phone. I ran up to my room, slammed the door, threw myself on the bed. I thought of texting Ashanti to give her a heads-up, get our stories straight, but didn’t bother. I’d had enough conspiring for one day.

  I heard my mom’s footsteps a few minutes later. She knocked on my door.

  “Yeah?” I said.

  She came in. “I spoke to Ashanti.”

  “Oh, my God.”

  “Because her mother couldn’t come to the phone, Robbie, so don’t jump to conclusions. But the point is Ashanti confirmed your story, said you just lost track of the time. She takes responsibility, by the way, specifically asked me not to blame you. Also, her mother grounded her, something about missing dance.”

  Her mother grounded her? That surprised me. Ashanti’s mom hadn’t seemed like the grounding type. Also, how weird—the whole concept
of someone who could actually get airborne being grounded.

  My mom took a deep breath, smiled a smile that seemed forced but was still a smile, meaning the worst was over.

  “So,” she said, “all I need from you is some assurance this won’t happen again. Home by six, unless you’ve got prior permission. Agreed?”

  “Agreed,” I said.

  Dad appeared, looking pretty excited. “That was van Slyke—his agent wants to meet me,” he said. His gaze went to Mom, to me, back to Mom. “Everything sorted out here?”

  Mom nodded.

  “Excellent,” Dad said, rubbing his hands together. His gaze returned to me. “What’s that on your wrist?”

  “Uh, this?” I said, my arm rising against my own interests to better expose the bracelet.

  “It’s called a friendship bracelet, Chas,” said my mom.

  “Yeah?” said Dad. “Who’s the friend?”

  “Well,” I said. “Um.”

  Mom leaned in for a closer look. “Is that a heart? How adorable.”

  “Whoa,” said Dad. “Meaning the friend is a boy?”

  I felt myself suddenly blushing—no idea why, since boyfriends were not in the picture, but it turned out to be the right move.

  “Chas?” Mom said, and she laid her finger across her lips to shut him up.

  “The robber barons,” said Mr. Stinecki in history class the next day, “is the name given to a group of industrialists and financiers in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Can we name some of them?”

  “Rockefeller.”

  “Carnegie.”

  “Morgan.”

  “Vanderbilt.”

  “Duke.”

  “Gould.”

  “Flagler.”

  “Flagler?” said Signe Stone. “I think I’m related to him.”

  “Does the development office know?” said Mr. Stinecki.

  Maybe that was a joke; if so, no one laughed. Mr. Stinecki was in his second year at Thatcher. There were rumors that he wasn’t being asked back for a third.